Hi folks, I'm new here.
I've been working on and off on a DIY reggae preamp project for quite a while now, originally based on a Raspberry pi 4 with the ELK Audio OS+Sushi and HifiBerry DAC+ ADC Pro, which is really powerful and great, but only provides 2 inputs and 2 outputs.
It uses Sushi as an audio host and graph manager (I can declare tracks, buses, sends and returns, put plugins on tracks, control via gRPC and OSC, and much more cool stuff) and several home brew JUCE VST3 plugins which are all open source. A big audio graph.
I've been looking for a way to make myself an audio interface which would have ran on the pi4 + ELK OS, but I meanwhile stumbled upon the Bela Gem Multi, which sounded like exactly what I needed (10in/10out is perfect for my project), so I grabbed myself one and started porting my old work from my ELK board to the Bela.
After quite some days of work, I have made several docker images to crossbuild Sushi for the PocketBeagle2 (too big to build on the bela itself), and also crossbuild my plugins, one docker image for JUCE 8 plugins, one for DPF plugins.
I am proud and happy to bring the good news : after a very long optimizing session, I've been able to make my whole audio graph run on the Bela Gem Multi @48KHz and a buffer size of 32 with only 1 or 2 underruns per minute that I know come from one specific plugin and I'm confident I'll shave it off !!
Here's what I've managed to cram on the PocketBeagle2's A53 with approx. 450mb of available ram for sushi and all the plugins :
- 15 VST3 instances, including a 4-band compressor, a sample player, a double stereo echo, a granular delay, and a quite overkill saturation plugin (the rest are lightweight channel strips and eqs)
- 32 internal sushi plugin instances, including 23 sends, 5 returns, 2 freeverb and 2 gain plugins
I've had to make some multicore processing wizardry to make it run smoothly with this much charge.
Also, JUCE plugins have approx. 25mb of memory overhead, while DPF only have around 3-5mb.
But if it works for this mega config, it will certainly work fine with yours ! 🙂
Here is all the tooling I've just released publicly :
https://github.com/LeoFabre/sushi-on-bela
When it looks good I'll also release my preamp project and make you guys a video.
Please have all the possible fun with this.
Special big ups to the Bela team and the ELK Audio devs for making such awesome tech, I can't sleep now ! 😂
Cheers !
Leozor
